That night, to make sure Tom didn’t steal anything, he slept in his boat. And as he lay back on the pelts, and felt the little wooden box with its silver dollar safe in the pouch on his belt, and listened to the faint breeze in the trees, he imagined that, as she had promised, he could hear his daughter’s voice. And he smiled with contentment.

Van Dyck left the young Englishman in the morning. He’d be at Pale Feather’s village before evening, stay there with his daughter all through tomorrow, and continue to Manhattan the day after that.

The weather was warm. He wore an open shirt. Around his waist, he had changed his usual leather belt and put on the wampum belt she’d given him. A little pouch containing the silver dollar hung from it.

The river was almost free of traffic. Occasionally they saw an Indian canoe in the shallows; but as they slipped downstream with the tide, they had the great waterway to themselves. The high western banks protected the river from the light breeze. The water was still. They seemed to be traveling in an almost unearthly quiet. After a time, they came past a bend where, from the west bank, a high point jutted out above the water, looking like a sentinel. Van Dyck had his own names for these landmarks. This one he called West Point. A while later, the river curved again to pass around the small mountain whose flattened hump had caused van Dyck to name it Bear Mountain. After that, the river opened out into a wider flow, two or three miles from bank to bank, which would extend southward fifteen miles until it narrowed into the great, long channel that ran down past Manhattan to the mighty harbor.

Time passed, and they were still some miles above the channel when one of the oarsmen nodded to him and van Dyck, turning to look back up the river, saw that some five miles back, another boat was visible, following them. As he stared he realized that the boat was gaining on them fast. “They must be in a hurry about something,” he remarked. But he wasn’t much interested.

Half an hour later, approaching the entrance to the channel, he glanced back again, and was astonished to discover how far the other vessel had come. It was much bigger than his own, with a mast for a sail; but as the breeze was from the south, the men were rowing. It had halved the distance between them and was advancing rapidly. He couldn’t see how many oars it carried, but one thing was certain.

“Those boys,” he said, “are rowing like fury.”